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VRFSearchTool

Yesterday I discovered an error in my DownloadRouterConfig application where it would terminate abnormally if a variable (a path name) in the settings.cfg file was left blank. Should no path name be specified, the application should have used it’s current working directory. Instead, it just crashed.

In fixing the code, I realized that all my other applications used this same function — so I corrected all of them as well. (I also took care of a few other miscellaneous things while I was in there. See the CHANGELOG, if interested.) If you happen to be using any of these applications to help manage your own Cisco routers, you’ll want to pull the latest code down to prevent any possible errors in the future.

Version 0.0.9-alpha was created as a new branch to address issue #1 and issue #2. A few individuals uses this version for nearly two weeks and did not report any problems with it. Therefore, I merged the new branch into the master, updated the version and took the application out of pre-release.

I now consider this version to be in Beta and ready for observed use in production environments.

Although it’s as functional as I expect the final product to be, I’m still calling it an Alpha at this stage because it’s still a little rough around the edges. It contains the minimum amount of code to be usable, lacks some error-checking on user input and is short on commentary in certain sections of the code.

I expect the Beta version of the application to be published sometime next week, put into production and turned loose so the team can start playing with it and provide feedback. Standby for another update, examples and screenshots next week!

This week I made great progress with my VRFSearchTool. I’m still not ready to push it to GitHub just yet, so I thought I’d blog a little bit about how it’s coming along.

While working through the functions I realized that I could better streamline the flow of the application by moving some of the functions around. Originally, the application design did not check for the presence of the “routers.txt” file until later in the program. The more I thought about this, the more backwards this seemed. The “routers.txt” file is required by the program to know which routers to log into. This is a requirement, if you plan on updating the index of VRF names in your environment.

Put simply, this is a Python application that allows a user to search for a VRF name and returns the hostname/router of the gateway on which it is configured.

I regularly have the need to locate a VPN tunnel configuration across multiple routers and lack a quick-and-easy way determine which router this tunnel is configured on without using other slow or inconvenient means. The idea is that this tool will provide a (very) basic means of maintaining an index of all configured VRFs throughout a Cisco environment and provide the user with the ability to search for those VRFs.